Paul
Goble
Staunton, June 30 – Most great
powers celebrate their status by pointing to their own achievements; Russia in
contrast seeks to boost itself not by doing that – there are too few to mention
– but by denigrating other countries, an approach Vladislav Inozemtsev suggests
is summed up in the phrase that however bad things are in Russia, they’re “better
than in Ukraine.”
Russian officials “and above all”
Vladimir Putin increasingly like to talk about Russia being a great power, the
Moscow commentator says; but they do so in a way that raises doubts that “Russian
politicians “really believe in the myths they have created” in that regard (gazeta.ru/column/vladislav_inozemcev/8334143.shtml).
If Russia’s powers that be really “consider
their country to be strong, it would be logical for them to suggest that it
occupies leading positions in the world on many if not the majority of
measures,” as the leaders of other major powers like those of the United
States, Germany and China do, Inozemtsev says.
But “in Russia for a long time
already has been put in place a different kind of discourse, based not so much
on the analysis of one’s own achievements as on a comparison of them with what
others have been able to achieve.” Such an approach, he says, began in the
1930s and reached its apogee with Khrushchev’s “catch up and surpass America”
slogan.
Unfortunately, subsequent events “showed
the illusory quality of hopes for the realization of this beautiful slogan in
practice.” The Soviet Union was simply too far “behind” and was falling ever
further “behind” as well. After 1991,
Russians had to face up to that lag, even though it made many of them
uncomfortable.
But in 2000, with the rise of
Vladimir Putin, there was a return to the pattern of boosting oneself by
denigrating others. A day before entering the Kremlin, the new leader talked about
how Russia could catch up with Portugal, even though at that point it was far
behind that European country in terms of per capita GDP.
Russia came close to doing so in
2013, Inozemtsev says, but then “the rhetoric [offered by the Kremlin] changed
again and this time much more radically.” Already with the onset of the
economic crisis, it became “fashionable” to talk about the fact that life in
Russia “all the same was not as bad as in neighboring countries.”
But Moscow made comparisons with
them because it had fallen even further behind from the major powers of the
world in terms of these economic measures. And with the crisis in Ukraine, the
Kremlin focused on that country above all, suggesting that the measure of
Russia’s greatness was the weakness of Ukraine.
Such an ideological trope,
Inozemtsev continues, raises questions about just how confident Russia’s rulers
are about what they are saying and inevitably focuses attention on how
unrealistic and unrealizable its “great power” aspirations really are, given
the way in which this highlights Russia’s weaknesses rather than any strengths.
“Can one imagine that the leader of a country
who was really confident in himself and in it would use such a line of
argument? That Obama in a message to Congress would tell Americans that they
should be glad because already now they live much better than their neighbors,
the Mexicans?”
Or that Germany’s Angela Merkel would tell her countrymen that they should be
pleased because Germans live better than Czechs or Hungarians? Inozemtsev says he has “never heard anything
like that and thinks that he will not in the future.” But such efforts to hide
one’s own shortcomings by pointing to others indicates that those who make them
don’t see their country as they encourage others to see it.
“Of course,” he concludes, “one can
continue to talk about Russia ‘rising from its knees,’ about Russian society
being informed by ‘traditional moral values,’ and about [its] ‘weight’ in world
politics constantly growing.” But suggesting that Russia is already a world
power because on some measures Ukraine is doing worse than it is undercuts all
such claims.
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